Thursday, September 10, 2009

We (me, my publisher) are still trying to work out what to call my (lengthy) system programming book. On my other blog, I'm asking for opinions from potential readers. If you'd like to help me name my book, please have a read of that blog post and send me a vote!

Monday, July 27, 2009

For quite a long time now, I've been working on a book that covers much the same topic area as man-pages; that is, the Linux/Unix kernel-userland interface (system calls, /proc, and so on) and C library (glibc) functions.

The book is going to be comprehensive: it runs to around 1500 pages (exactly how long will depend on typesetting and page layout, which are just getting started), has 64 chapters, 116 diagrams, 85 tables, and around 250 example programs. It will be published in the first half of 2010 by No Starch Press. You can read about its ongoing progress towards publication in my other blog at blog.man7.org. To get an overview of what the book is about, read this post, and to see the table of contents of the book, read this post.

The feature_test_macro(7) page adds information on the changes that glibc 2.10 makes for alignment with POSIX.1-2008, and adds an example program that can be used to display the feature test macros that are implicitly defined by particular glibc versions and as a consequence of explicitly setting macros.

The clock_getres(2) page was moved from Section 3 to Section 2 (since the interfaces it describes really are system calls, not library functions), and adds a description of CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW, new in 2.6.28.

Some bugs were fixed in select_tut(2) and many changes and tidy-ups were made to the text.